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Lachrymae, Op 48a

'Reflections on a song of Dowland' (If my complaints could passions move); arranged for viola and string orchestra in 1976; based on Op 48 for viola and piano, written in 1950 for William Primrose who gave the premiere with Britten in Aldeburgh in 1950

Introduction

While working on Billy Budd in the first half of 1950 Britten broke off from the opera to compose Lachrymae, his only mature piece for viola and piano, for the distinguished viola player William Primrose whom he had met the previous year when touring the United States. Primrose gave the first performance at the 1950 Aldeburgh Festival with the composer at the piano. Twenty-five years later, in the last year of his life, Britten orchestrated the piano part for strings to create a concertante piece, Op 48a, for Cecil Aronowitz, another distinguished violist and close professional colleague.

Lachrymae is a series of variations on the first phrase of Dowland’s song ‘If my complaints could passions move’. Following a Lento introduction in which the song is quoted in the bass of the piano part, a sequence of contrasting ‘reflections’ ensues. In the sixth, Appassionato, Britten quotes from another Dowland song, ‘Flow my tears’. The last section returns by means of a slow crescendo to Dowland’s original melody and harmony, when it is heard complete for the first time. Britten’s exploration of the Dowland material is extremely thorough, and it generates not only the principal melodic material but the harmonic vocabulary as well. Such is its organic resourcefulness that the techniques used in Lachrymae are reminiscent of the exhaustive musical derivations to be found in the Church Parables of the subsequent decade.

Recordings

'A chronologically wide-ranging Britten programme performed with unerring sensitivity and much quiet insight. With first-rate sound and balance throug ...'A fascinating collection of neglected Britten, excellent playing from the Nash Ensemble and first-rate recording' (The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs)» More

Anthony Marwood joins the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov for a powerful new recording of Britten’s youthful Violin Concerto, a work abounding in potent lyricism and frenetic energy. It’s coupled with the even earlier Double Concer ...» More

Details

Lachrymae, Britten’s ‘Reflections on a song of Dowland’, was composed in April 1950 for the Scottish viola player William Primrose and first performed—in its original version for viola and piano—by dedicatee and composer at that year’s Aldeburgh Festival. The piano part was later arranged for small string orchestra (unusually lacking first-violin parts) in 1976 at the suggestion of Cecil Aronowitz, who performed it at the Aldeburgh Festival the following year, six months after Britten’s death. The work is a satisfying synthesis of various musical elements carrying a strong personal significance for the composer. The viola had been his own instrument since childhood and, although his recorded legacy as a violist consists of the modest contribution of a single (but crucial) note in Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note with the Zorian Quartet in 1946, he fully exploited the instrument’s capability for producing intensely mellow sonorities in both orchestral and chamber works. In casting the Lachrymae in the form of a seamlessly evolving set of variations Britten was able to draw on the vast experience he had gained with this musical structure in the 1930s and 1940s. And his decision to select John Dowland’s famous song ‘If my complaints could passions move’ (First Booke of Songes or Ayres, 1597) as the basis for the piece continued the celebration of English musical and literary heritage which had constituted a fundamental part of his art since his return home from America in the early 1940s. In the middle of the piece Britten alludes to another famous Dowland song, ‘Flow my tears’ (Second Booke, 1600).

Dowland’s theme has a strong rising and falling shape which makes Britten’s transformations of it readily comprehensible to the listener. Tremolo allusions to its melodic profile at the opening usher in a quiet statement of the theme in the lower strings, but the harmony remains complex and elusive until the very end of the work when, in a moment both technically adept and artistically magical, Britten’s music gradually merges into the simple but expressive harmonic idiom of Dowland’s original song. This idea of a theme and variations ‘in reverse’, as it were, was later adopted by Britten in his second set of Dowland ‘reflections’ for solo guitar, Nocturnal (composed for Julian Bream in 1963, and recorded on CDA67648), and in the treatment of Russian themes in the Cello Suite No 3 (composed for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1971).